The Return of the King of Patchwork

Last Thursday, for instance, after pulling an all-nighter on the Home Shopping Network to pitch coats and bags from a new line called Chi, Mr. Falchi was standing in front of an ornately snowy Christmas tree in the HSN studio in St. Petersburg, Fla. It was around 2:10 p.m., and the sales count on a $99.99 leatherlike coat with a plush collar was up to 16,011. A woman on the phone was saying, “You can smell Europe looking at your design.”

Mr. Falchi, a Brazilian who got his start dressing rockers and jazzmen in 1970s Greenwich Village — where he still lives with Missy, his wife of 25 years — mumbled something about his roots.

Then there are those nights in New York when he and his wife are out at some hip place like Freemans, on the Lower East Side, and they see a young woman at the bar with an old buffalo bag of Mr. Falchi’s on her shoulder.

Once he said to a girl, “That’s my bag.” She didn’t care for the remark, but then it sank in that this pot-bellied, gray-haired guy with silver bracelets was really him, the designer Carlos Falchi. Maybe in an age of brands and manufactured nostalgia she didn’t even think he was real. She called her mother, who bought the bag 30 years before, and put Mr. Falchi on the phone and then closed the celebrity moment with a photo.

That’s how it is with him. One day he’s busing tables at Max’s Kansas City — it’s 1970 — and going home to bleach snakeskin in his bathtub on Eighth Street for patchwork pants. Jimi Hendrix is a neighbor. Forty years later, after experiencing just about everything you can imagine — early success, the implosion of the Japanese economy (“That was a big wham”), the It Bag craze, the loss of his name to another company — he gets a call from Target. The mass merchandiser wants him to produce a line of bags. They will be available Nov. 1 for two months.

On Thursday, as she watched her husband sell the separate HSN line on television, Ms. Falchi, in the couple’s office on West 39th Street, acknowledged Target’s expectations. “It’s a high-stakes design competition,” she said. “You want to put out your best work. It has to look innovative. Carlos worked very hard on the bags. And Target tends to pick younger designers.”

Perhaps, despite the synthetic materials used for the Target bags, the appeal is that Mr. Falchi is a craftsman. He is one of the last makers of leather goods in New York. He employs about 60 people on three floors of the building on West 39th, and the bags he makes for stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Saks start from pieces of python, alligator and ostrich, among other skins. Prices for those bags can reach $5,000, though many are around $1,500.

At a visit to his workrooms in August, multicolor pieces of leather were stacked like poker chips; virtually every scrap is saved and used in patchwork. As Mr. Falchi looked over some crocodile-embossed leather satchels being made for an order, there was a steady tapping of hammers at the worktables.

Photo

CRAFT Carlos Falchi, in his studio, is one of New York's last makers of leather goods.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Below a faded picture of Miles Davis in a pair of Mr. Falchi’s trousers from the ’70s was an oblong piece of crocodile. “That’s about $900,” he said. “I need almost two skins for a bag, so that’s about $1,500 alone in materials.” In another room, a big, smooth, yellow-pale shoulder bag, pinched at the front with a drawstring and evocative of the 1970s, was hanging from a peg.

In just about every way, a Falchi bag represents the opposite design aesthetic of an Hermès Kelly bag, though Mr. Falchi says he uses some of the same tanneries as the French house. The most obvious difference — and it nearly put him out of business a few years ago — is that a Falchi bag is soft and unstructured. When fashion turned ladylike and accessories became formal, Mr. Falchi tried to make a version of the Kelly.

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“What a disaster,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it. The hand wasn’t there.”

When Mr. Falchi began making bags in the ’70s — with a boost from the retail legend Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel — his style, for better or worse, was rough and improvised. It was unsnobbish. Ms. Falchi, who was working in the special events office at Neiman Marcus in Dallas when she met her husband, said: “When you bought that buffalo leather bag of his, you felt so out there. It was a quiet rebellion of a generation of women who didn’t want what their mothers had.”

Linda Fargo, the fashion director at Bergdorf, said she was struck by the continuity of Mr. Falchi’s bags when styles dating to the ’70s were displayed last spring in the store’s windows. (His vintage bags are now coveted.)

Another way to look at his bags is that they are not perfect. They don’t look as if they have been punched out by the hundreds. That organic quality would diminish, he said, if he made them in Europe or Asia. “I think the people who work here bring New York with them — the tension of time, the nervousness, the subway,” he said. “All that is in these bags.”

The Falchis have lived in the West Village for years, and they raised two daughters (Kate, 25, is a designer at the company; Juliet, 23, works at Estée Lauder) before the neighborhood was fashionable. “They’re hippies in the true sense,” said a friend, the designer Ralph Rucci, adding, “Missy is the equalizer in the relationship.” Mr. Falchi agreed: “She is very grounded. It’s that Texas upbringing.”

As gregarious as Mr. Falchi is — he helped many designers create their accessories — he isn’t a regular at industry events. “In order to have a family life, he needs downtime,” Ms. Falchi said. With a laugh, she added: “Let’s be very clear — Carlos has burned the candle at both ends. He didn’t need a reason to go to Studio 54.”

Mr. Falchi, whose business generates about $100 million a year in retail sales, would be the first to admit he has made some bad decisions. The worst, he said, was to get involved in the development of a former warehouse in Long Island City, Queens, in the late 1980s, and to overexpand his staff. “Yeah, I have had some real tough times,” he said, “but I had Missy and the kids and some very good workers.” For a time he also lost the right to his name.

Such complications probably discouraged investors, said William Sweedler, the chief executive of Windsong Brands, which owns a number of companies, including Caribbean Joe and Sharper Image. Last spring Mr. Sweedler and a group led by Marvin Traub acquired a majority interest in Mr. Falchi’s company, with the designer and his wife remaining in charge of the creative decisions.

“Everyone in the accessories industry was interested in doing something with Carlos, but the issue was his name was owned by another company,” said Mr. Sweedler, who reacquired the name. He thinks the company can reach $250 million in retail sales.

Part of that effort is to sell an array of products like sweaters and jewelry on HSN. As Mr. Falchi plugged the $99 coat, his wife observed, not really joking at all: “We’re the slow-handbag movement. We’re small, we’re local and we still make it the way we always did. That’s what you preserve.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 29, 2009, on Page E1 of the National edition with the headline: The Return Of the King Of Patchwork. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe